Movie review: The Cross: The Arthur Blessitt Story -- 3 out of 5 stars

Roger MooreOrlando Sentinel Movie Critic

Arthur Blessitt is a Mississippi-born evangelist who wanders the globe toting a 12-foot wooden cross on his shoulder. He's been doing it for 40 years, starting in LA where he had a Sunset Strip ministry, and he's carried that cross on every continent, walking every country on the face of the Earth -- more than 300 in all.

You've probably seen him on your local news at some point, a solitary man (his support team is rarely seen) rolling a weathered, worn and much-traveled cross through your state or town, or on the national news, where he's been the occasional subject of a feature story or in the middle of conflict as he marched his cross into war zones and through dictatorships all over the world.

Blessitt is the focal point and pretty much the only voice in Michael Crouch's engaging documentary, The Cross: The Arthur Blessitt Story, opening around the country March 27.

Crouch occasionally pipes up as narrator, noting "It's almost conveniently easy to write him off as a wacko." But that's the last thing this affectionate documentary does. Blessitt comes off as a perfectly sane, good-humored, emotional and tolerant pastor who discovered, as a young man, his unique style of ministry and has stuck with it for 40 years.

Blessitt has a million anecdotes about odd meals, touching streetside conversions and dangerous moments from that trek. Walking through 52 war zones (he's full of self-verified statistics) will give you those. There was the time street fighters threatened him in Northern Ireland, the near robbery and murder in El Salvador and a CNN-captured visit to Beirut during the 1983 Israeli invasion. A clearly bemused but also touched Yasser ArafatÖ lets Blessitt pray over him.

Blessitt recounts "miracles" and remembers the first time he was arrested for shaking the hand of a black man in Jackson, Miss., in the '60s. And he recalls his ugliest moment, the (filmed) police assault in the middle of Franco's Madrid in the 1970s. The fascist dictator's civil guard either took umbrage at this Protestant's ministering in the middle of Catholic Spain (the locals embraced him and his cross), or forgot the Christian church's role in allowing Franco to take power in the first place.

People ask him, "Arthur, are you making a difference?" Blessitt says, asking and answering his own question. And that's the serious short-coming of the film. As sweet as the guy plainly is, by not questioning anybody other than Arthur, the film lacks credibility. It's a "take it on faith" documentary, a term Michael Moore's most ardent fans can appreciate. Putting words in skeptics' mouths and gently shooting them down is classic "straw man" propaganda, something any Rush Limbaugh listener will recognize. And by not giving us details of how the ministry is financed or the simple logistics of all this travel, the film leaves questions hanging.

True believers will certainly take more inspiration from this story than others. But Crouch has filmed and edited (much of the footage was Blessitt-provided) a lovely if somewhat repetitive and overlong appreciation of the way one man decided to put his faith into action.